Songs of Pain: The Early Recordings, Vol. 1

Stress;
1980

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If you're able to appreciate the finer points of Daniel Johnston's music without entangling yourself in the
sordid details of his life and circumstance, more power to you. To maintain this aura of blissful ignorance,
I'd recommend keeping the liner notes to this collection tucked inside the front of the CD case-- that way,
all you'll see when you open the case is Paul Leary's well-intentioned mashnote to Johnston's legacy. "I
thought my band [the Butthole Surfers] was out there," Leary muses, "but Daniel Johnston was way out there."

However, inside the insert is a less simplistic essay by Austin Chronicle writer Louis Black,
detailing his history with Daniel Johnston-- how he received this tape of remarkable songs from a gawky
24-year-old in 1985, how musicians and media outlets both locally and nationally took notice of this kid
that saw the Beatles as inspiration and equals, how Johnston was "a pain in the ass... manipulative and
naïve." Black writes about the time he drove down to the University of Texas campus to find Daniel standing
in the middle of a creek. "His eyes had gone mad white," Black notes. "He was singing, he was testifying,
he was demanding our baptism... He talked of God and the devil. Of being lost and being saved." And of
course, the notion of the inexorable link between "genius" and "madness" is brought up.

After sharing all this with the reader, Black then tries to backtrack, writing, "Okay, erase every word
above," much in the same way a trial attorney would withdraw an objectionable comment knowing full well
that those words will stick in the mind of the jurors. It's hard to look past Johnston's story when
listening to any of this music. When he offers a lyric from "A Little Story" ("And they beat him/ And
they robbed him/ And they hung him for being good/ And they laughed and make jokes/ While they stood in
his blood") and punctuates the line with a loud piano chord and five seconds of silence, it's a chilling
moment.

It also goes a long way in souring the happy-go-lucky air of other pro-Christian polemics like
"Wicked World" and "Premarital Sex". And then there's something like "Hate Song", where Johnston offers
yet another jaunty barrel-rolling tune on his piano. And he's singing about a girl that's waiting for a
call (from him) that won't come, painting the picture with unapologetic strokes like, "The clock will tick
and it will make you sick/ As every moment of your life passes by/ You'll contemplate suicide with a knife
one night/ It won't be nice."

Perhaps the one track that epitomizes what a Song of Pain can be is "My Baby Cares for the Dead": just
Daniel and some microphone buzz, singing about a girl he loves that spurned him for an undertaker-- in
fact, according to Black's notes, most of the songs in this collection are about that girl. It's awful
enough that Johnston sings about the birth of a baby being the death of their love, but when he goes
further to say, without hesitation, "I know someday my baby/ Will care for meee-eeee," and goes into detail
about being embalmed and buried in a coffin while intoning that line again and again in his detached and
damning sing-songy fashion, it's hard to not wince or cringe. It would be too easy to credit Johnston's
supposed lack of guile for infecting this song with such a sense of overbearing dread, since it's safe to
say there are numerous songwriters continually striving for the high level of conversational verisimilitude
Johnston casually exhibits throughout most of these songs.

Of course, such matter-of-fact plainspeak is more appreciable in the lighter songs. Witness "I Save
Cigarette Butts", which begins with a great line ("I save cigarette butts for a poor girl across town")
and then details the story of Daniel losing his girl to a guy that took her to a wrestling match while
Johnston's Rocket 88 barrels through. After distracting the listener with mentions of Frankenstein and a
dream where angels spill beer on Jesus, it turns out that the "wrestling match" isn't exactly Greco-Roman.
There's another moment in the rollicking "More Dead Than Alive" where Daniel talks to a "psychological man"
about "this problem about this coffin" and ends up getting prescribed cough drops. Says Daniel, "I said,
'Please don't make such dumb jokes.'" Better yet is "Wicked Will", a pithy tale about the title character
and Easy Sue that takes a cue from The Kinks' "Lola". And better than that is "Never Relaxed",
where Johnston takes a Job-like boy with perpetual nervousness through puberty and death. In these
moments, it's easier to forget the baggage and simply appreciate the music.

After all, that's what Louis Black wants when he asks us to push aside the stories and tragedy and sadness
of Johnston's life. He wants listeners to appreciate Daniel's candor and emotion, his way with a melody,
his awkward, nasal voice, his haphazard, yet spirited, musicianship. He wants us to treat this supposed
"outsider" music as we would our favorite songs. Like I said, it's nearly impossible to admire Daniel
Johnston the Songwriter without thinking about Daniel Johnston the Person, and I'm not sure that it's the
best thing to do. Even with such knowledge, it's not hard to see what fans admire in his music. However,
I did manage to have one of those moments while listening to this collection, and for that brief moment
all the genius rhetoric blithely tossed about by folks like Kurt Cobain and David Bowie made all the sense
in the world. Make of that what you will.